An exclusive look inside the largest effort ever mounted to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive
Vox senior environmental correspondent Benji Jones’s feature is a deeply reported look at the largest coral restoration effort ever attempted. Australia is deploying hundreds of scientists, cutting-edge technology, robots, floating nurseries, and millions of baby corals grown and reseeded by hand in a race to save the Great Barrier Reef — the largest living structure on Earth — from collapse.
Benji spent two weeks embedded with the people trying to pull this off. He joined night crews on open water, collecting coral spawn during the largest reproductive event on the planet. He watched assisted spawning — “coral IVF,” as researchers call it — inside SeaSim, a state-of-the-art lab operating like an industrial-scale coral nursery. And he logged hours underwater, seeing both the extraordinary life the reef still holds and the damage already done by warming seas.
The story shows what’s possible — and what feels futile and absurd.
Australia is doing almost everything imaginable to protect its most iconic ecosystem, except the one thing that ultimately determines whether any of this will last: cutting global carbon emissions fast enough.
This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand both the promise and the hard limits of climate solutions.
Can the right diet really cure all our health problems?
We recently launched Good Medicine, a health care newsletter that asks the kinds of questions readers are actually wrestling with and is deeply skeptical of easy answers.
This week, senior health correspondent Dylan Scott takes on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s embrace of the vision “food is medicine.” On the surface, it sounds like something everyone could agree on. Of course diet matters. Of course ultra-processed foods are a problem. But Dylan digs into the darker edge of this idea: how it blames individuals, ignores structural barriers, and — most concerningly — positions food instead of medicine.
If you care about your own health and wellness but are fed up with the AHHHHHH!!!! of it all, we’re doing lots of things in Good Medicine that you’ll be interested in: answering reader questions about microplastics in takeout containers, flagging surprising new research (yes, including the possibility that GLP-1 drugs could change airline fuel costs), and cutting through wellness hype with clarity and humility. Check us out!
Why forecasters struggled to see this extreme winter storm coming
When climate correspondent Umair Irfan and I were talking about the behemoth storm hitting most of the US earlier this week, he told me something I didn’t know: Forecasters have gotten pretty good about predicting when precisely and the severity of weather events like heat waves will seize the country, but they’re still struggling to game out winter storms like this one.
Cold snaps like this are notoriously difficult to forecast, and as one scientist puts it, models are often “playing catch-up.” Umair unpacks the complex atmospheric dynamics behind the massive winter storm sweeping the country, and how just as forecasting models are getting better at predicting extreme cold weeks in advance, the US is cutting back on climate and weather research.
At a moment when extreme weather is becoming more consequential, we’re actively choosing to see less clearly.
Can America build beautiful places again?
Vox senior writer Marina Bolotnikova explores something that I — who fled Colorado’s drab suburbs as soon as I could — have long suspected but could never quite voice: America’s housing crisis isn’t just about supply, zoning, or cost. It’s also about ugliness.
We’ve spent decades constructing places that feel alienating and soulless: endless sprawl, strip malls, highways, and boxy, cookie-cutter buildings. Is this really how we want to live? And if not, what would it take to realign our built environment with actual human needs?
New research suggests that aesthetic distaste — people thinking new housing looks bad — is one of the strongest predictors of whether they’ll oppose building more of it. Marina asks the right questions: What if housing abundance wasn’t ugly? What if it didn’t just mean more homes, but better ones?
As Marina writes: “Our housing crisis is a nightmare for millions of Americans, but it is also, perhaps, a rare invitation to rebuild the way we live.”
